The following Thursday evening, her letters in reply having been vague and evasive, they came again, each hoping to get Lucy's aunt to himself, and on the ground of being Jim's most devoted friend ask her straight questions such as who and what was Wemyss. Also, more particularly, why. Who and what he was was of no sort of consequence if he would only be and do it somewhere else; but they arrived determined to get an answer to the third question: Why Wemyss? And when they got there, there he was again; there before them this time, standing on the hearthrug as if he had never moved off it since the week before and had gone on talking ever since.
This was the end of the Thursday evenings. The next one was unattended, except by Wemyss; but Miss Entwhistle had been forced to admit the engagement, and from then on right up to the marriage her life was a curse to her and a confusion. Just because Jim had appointed no guardian in his will for Lucy, every single one of his friends felt bound to fill the vacancy. They were indignant when they discovered that almost before they had begun Lucy was being carried off, but they were horrified when they discovered what Wemyss it was who was carrying her off. Most of them quite well remembered the affair of Mrs. Wemyss's death a few weeks before, and those who did not went, as Miss Entwhistle had gone, to the British Museum and read it up. They also, though they themselves were chiefly unworldly persons who lost money rather than made it, instituted the most searching private inquiries into Wemyss's business affairs, hoping that he might be caught out as such a rascal or so penniless, or, preferably, both, that no woman could possibly have anything to do with him. But Wemyss's business record, the solicitor they employed informed them, was quite creditable. Everything about it was neat and in order. He was not what the City would call a wealthy man, but if you went out say to Ealing, said the solicitor, he would be called wealthy. He was solid, and he was certainly more than able to support a wife and family. He could have been quite wealthy if he had not adopted a principle to which he had adhered for years of knocking off work early and leaving his office at an hour when other men did not,—the friends were obliged to admit that this, at least, seemed sensible. There had been, though, a very sad occurrence recently in his private life,—'Oh, thank you,' interrupted the friends, 'we have heard about that.'
But however good Wemyss's business record might be, it couldn't alter their violent objection to Jim's daughter marrying him. Apart from the stuff he talked, there was the inquest. They were aware that in this they were unreasonable, but they were all too much attached to Jim's memory to be able to be reasonable about a man they felt so certain he wouldn't have liked. Singly and in groups they came at safe times, such as after breakfast, to Eaton Terrace to reason with Lucy, too much worried to remember that you cannot reason with a person in love. Less wise than Miss Entwhistle, they tried to dissuade her from marrying this man, and the more they tried the tighter she clung to him. To the passion of love was added, by their attitudes, the passion of protectiveness, of flinging her body between him and them. And all the while, right inside her innermost soul, in spite of her amazement at them and her indignation, she was smiling to herself; for it was really very funny, the superficial judgments of these clever people when set side by side with what she alone knew,—the tenderness, the simple goodness of her heart's beloved.
Lucy laughed to herself in her happy sureness. She had miraculously found not only a lover she could adore and a guide she could follow and a teacher she could look up to and a sufferer who without her wouldn't have been healed, but a mother, a nurse, and a playmate. In spite of his being so much older and so extraordinarily wise, he was yet her contemporary,—sometimes hardly even that, so boyish was he in his talk and jokes. Lucy had never had a playmate. She had spent her life sitting, as it were, bolt upright mentally behaving, and she hadn't known till Wemyss came on the scene how delicious it was to relax. Nonsense had delighted her father, it is true, but it had to be of a certain kind; never the kind to which the adjective 'sheer' would apply. With Wemyss she could say whatever nonsense came into her head, sheer or otherwise. He laughed consumedly at her when she talked it. She loved to make him laugh. They laughed together. He understood her language. He was her playmate. Those people outside, old and young, who didn't know what playing was and were trying to get her away from him, might beat at the door behind which he and she sat listening, amused, as long as they liked.
'How they all try to separate us,' she said to him one day, sitting as usual safe in the circle of his arm, her head on his breast.
'You can't separate unity,' remarked Wemyss comfortably.
She wanted to tell them that answer, confront them with it next time they came after breakfast, as a discouragement to useless further effort, but she had learned that they somehow always knew when what she said was Everard's and not hers, and then, of course, prejudiced as they were, they wouldn't listen.
'Now, Lucy, that's pure Wemyss,' they would say. 'For heaven's sake say something of your own.'
At Christmas Wemyss had an encounter with Miss Entwhistle, who ever since she had been told of the engagement had been so quiet and inoffensive that he quite liked her. She had seemed to recognise her position as a side-show, and had accepted it without a word. She no longer asked him questions, and she made no difficulties. She left him alone with Lucy in Eaton Terrace, and though she had to go with them on the outings she asserted herself so little that he forgot she was there. But when towards the middle of December he remarked one afternoon that he always spent Christmas at The Willows, and what day would she and Lucy come down, Christmas Eve or the day before, to his astonishment she looked astonished, and after a silence said it was most kind of him, but they were going to spend Christmas where they were.
'I had hoped you would join us,' she said. 'Must you really go away?'